'...Former Netscape CEO Jim Barskdale famously said that there were only two core business models: bundling (bringing together multiple products and/or services into a single package), and unbundling (the reverse, where you buy just a single thing performing a single task). Fortnite: Battle Royale, at its start, was essentially an unbundle – not just of Fortnite: Save the World, but of gaming overall. There’s no narrative, no characters, no context or story, no “missions”, no other modes, such as a single-player or managed multiplayer experience (i.e. you can’t choose with whom you do or don’t play, nor how many). It was just a 100 person Battle Royale. You land on an island and fight until only one person is left. Rinse, repeat. -- But over the past year, Fortnite has shown an ability to rebundle much of the gaming industry at large. -- Today, for example, Fortnite’s single map includes multiple terrain types (snow, ice, desert, forest, plains, etc.), each of which is typically a distinct map in shooting games. The game also routinely adds limited time modes, such as riffs on capture-the-flag, the ability to become The Avengers: Infinity War’s Thanos, and disco domination (in which you win points by dancing on disco floors spread across the map). There are also recurring evolutions related to the game’s seasonal narratives. During season six, which spanned Halloween, the map was overrun with zombie-like creatures generated by purple monoliths spun-off from season five. Every few weeks, Fortnite also adds (or removes) new interaction models (you can race go-karts and do vehicle-based assault, engage in airborne dogfights, use balloons and gliders to float across the map and engage in aerial assault, etc.) In addition, players benefit from individual challenges that earn experience points, awards and apparel – for example, asking a player to race across the map to visit various areas without getting killed. In addition, each of these changes benefit from rapid, data-based iteration. The Fortnite team is able to closely monitor how any change is adopted, its impact on total play time, game duration, performance, and so on. All to make sure it “works” – or alternatively, to keep the game from ever feeling “static” or “solved”. -- These changes – even the games fundamental shift from Save the World to Battle Royale – are what Fortnite was designed for. Fortnite intended to merge specific shooter dynamics with the sandbox nature of Minecraft so that players could define their own style of play. However, this expansiveness threatens a wide variety of games. Why buy a dedicated dog fighting game, for example, when you can already play one in Fortnite (and already do so with your friends). While there will always be a new game format or hit game, Fortnite is uniquely capable of becoming that game, or expanding into it (and it’s worth highlighting that Epic’s Unreal business depends on its ability to build/support all types of gameplay).'

If 15 percent of the public is self-aware and about 250 powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct since last year, about 38 of these men should have had a personal reckoning. But when you ask these men to write a “soulful, introspective exploration of their own misdeeds,” Stephen Metcalf argued on Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast recently, “you get the very kind of person who committed those misdeeds, and you get them repeating all of the mentalities, exhibiting all of the mentalities that allowed them to commit them in the first place.” It’s been a year since #metoo went viral, and Dan Harmon appears to be the only man who has had the self-awareness to publicly acknowledge his behavior and parse it. The others have proven Metcalf right.

When managers and scholars talk about diversity’s impact on organizations and teams, they’re usually referring to the effects on collective accuracy and objectivity, analytical thinking, and innovativeness. On “harder” measures of financial performance, researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship with diversity—particularly when studying large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice on, say, profits or market share can b...

how has slack gotten 34% of women in technical roles without a head of diversity?

For one thing, the company has, since 2015, proactively sought out candidates from outside traditional programmer pipelines like Stanford and MIT, recruiting through all-women’s coding camps like Hackbright, as well as programs that focus on training black and Latino programmers such as Code2040. Recruiters are trained to look at skills rather than a candidate’s university pedigree. In 2015, Slack worked with Textio, a company that analyzes job descriptions to ensure they appeal to the widest possible audience. (Slack’s job descriptions feature phrases like “care deeply” and “lasting relationships,” which statistically draw more applications from women. Microsoft’s, by contrast, feature words like “insatiably” and “competing.” Amazon’s keywords: “maniacal” and “wickedly.")

Plenty of tech companies are attempting to make their pipeline of candidates more diverse. But an organization won’t find much success recruiting a more diverse group of employees unless its leaders are aware of their existing internal inclusion and equity issues. Unless leadership has already started to tackle these issues, it’s likely that these new hires will enter into an environment that they won’t want to stick around in for long.

One of my suggestions is to calculate whether you compensate and promote people fairly, which requires some level of manual analysis. It also takes a lot of work to make this math repeatable, so you can check in on your organization’s progress over time. And if you’re doing this analysis for the first time, you probably won’t have statistically significant results, because you may not have enough folks from underrepresented communities yet.

Drucker suggests, “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it”, and that’s where I started. Especially when you invest a bunch of your time and energy into something, it’s easy to index on your effort over your effect, so starting with success metrics was important to keep me grounded in real impact.

I started measuring the areas proposed by Lara Hogan in Inclusion math, and added a few more based on discussion with coworkers and friends:

Retention: do underrepresented minorities (URMs) stay at your company as long as other folks?
Time at level: do URMs experience comparable rates of career progression at your company?
Level distribution: are URMs represented in all levels of seniority?
Compensation: are URMs compensated equitably for their level?
Usage rate: which individuals lead and participate in inclusion and culture efforts? Are senior managers and senior engineers involved? How broad is the pool of participants?
Social recognition: do you talk about inclusion efforts in your forums of culture? Company meetings, offsites, and so on.
Performance recognition: how are inclusion and culture efforts recognized in your performance and compensation process?
Hiring: is your pipeline diverse, and are URMs in your pipeline getting and accepting offers at similar rates? (The pipeline still matters.)
Many of these metrics are easy to analyze in partnership with human resources. Much of what we did to impact those metrics is obvious (e.g. cold sourcing), and I don’t want to retread tired ground, but measuring and moving some of these metrics did require meaningful changes to how I work, and I think those are worth digging into a bit.

A space uniting diversity-focused technology groups in Chicago.
We're fortunate to have so many amazing meetups and organizations in Chicago that target underrepresented groups in technology and development.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a single place for the organizers and members of these groups to connect and collaborate on the issues we care about?

'Here's an open secret about the Internet that all seasoned citizens of it subconsciously understand, but few dare to consciously admit to themselves: the Internet has no trash cans. There may be places that are, by institutional consensus, dark, dank places (the DarkNet is the collective term), but unlike your laptop, there are no places where stuff that's been irreversibly declared, by consensus, to be trash, goes to be "deleted". Instead, the Internet is like a natural ecosystem. All information gets 100% recycled continuously. Whatever you might think is "bad" doesn't ever go away.'

Etsy believes in the power of diversity. We believe that having diverse perspectives will help us make better decisions and build better products. We also know that it’s not enough to just recruit diverse talent: we’ve got to retain it!

A key to retaining diverse talent is fostering a supportive work environment. There are a lot of major organizational changes that can help (flexible work arrangements, equal pay, and opportunities for growth and leadership to name a few), but what can you—the individual—really do to help?

Despite the nearly 50 years that have passed since the Women’s Liberation Movement, the issue of equal opportunities and equal pay for women persists to this day. Even in Silicon Valley, one of the most forward-thinking corners of the world, women continue to earn less than men.

To better understand why this gap persists, and in honor of Equal Pay Day 2016, Hired set out to analyze its massive salary data set across gender, location, role and company type. Because Hired candidates set a preferred salary and all interview requests made by companies on the platform include compensation details, Hired has unprecedented visibility into the salaries that men and women ask for and what companies, in turn, offer them. The data in this report was pulled from an analysis of more than 100,000 job offers across 15,000 candidates and 3,000 companies on Hired’s platform.

Our hope is that the findings in this report will address this issue in two ways. First, by providing insight into the issue of gender bias in the workforce, we want to encourage companies to investigate their compensation policies to ensure that they don’t perpetuate patterns of inequality. Second, we want to arm women with information about this phenomenon to empower them to ask for their market worth. This issue certainly won’t be solved overnight, but with both sides working together, we’ll all be on a path to a more equitable future.

It is crucial for companies with multiple worldwide locations to take an intercultural perspective to address employee needs and attitudes towards information security training programs and compliance with best practices. If cultural differences are well understood in advance, the organization can tailor its security training to increase comprehension and adoption by a global workforce.

Our Handbook
At Clef we’re working to build an inclusive company with a value-driven culture. That’s an easy thing to want and say, but it’s difficult to practice because exclusion is the default in our industry. It takes active effort to find the hidden biases in our companies and remove them.

As we started growing our team this year, we looked for a starter-kit of inclusive policies. A lot of great work is being done to discuss cultural problems and their solutions, but it’s coming from a lot of different voices around the web and very little is written in the form of policy.

We wanted to put those learnings into practice, so we decided to write our own handbook and open source it.

This repository contains all of the policies that we use at Clef. It represents many hours of research, lots of thoughtful debates, and some serious introspection. It’s certainly not perfect, but we think it’s an exciting place to start.

Feel free to fork this repository and use any or all of these policies, and to modify them in whatever way makes sense for your company. We hope that by publishing them, other companies can benefit from our research and make their own policies more inclusive.

All feedback and suggestions (especially in the form of pull requests) are very appreciated. We’ve gotten several different perspectives to help arrive at these policies, but we are certainly missing many more and making mistakes as a result. This is a work in progress that we hope will get better with more time and more contributors.

If these policies sound like a place where you want to work, check out our jobs postings at getclef.com/about.